3 Cards (Vol 57)

So after my trip to Japan I brought back a big stack of cards. There were so many cards in that stack that I had no idea where to start when blogging about them. So instead of condensing them all into a big post (which most of you will only read a quarter of), I decided to blog about them at a rate of three cards at a time. Maybe some of them will make for interesting material, maybe they won't. Let's find out.

Today's post is going to be a wee bit different. I'm going to be featuring three different packs with a combined total of five cards within them.

Pack 1

I found that Japanese grocery stores still carry some unique stuff like these cards that come with gum (novel concept right?). The reigning king of this genre of card+gum products over in Japan appears to be a company called enSKY.

These packs usually have like one or two clear acetate cards max inside with some gum. The gum is sweet and nice but the flavor only lasts like five seconds and you spit it out. The real prize is the card anyway.

Might as well start off with a character some who are in the know are aware of, Hatsune Miku. A virtual CGI anime girl who does live shows using hologram technology and people actually pay to attend her "concerts". I've listened to her stuff and it's electronica that doesn't have much in terms of substance but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't catchy.

Anyway the pack above is a Clear Card Collection Gum 5, I assume that means this is series five of a long series. Japan's collecting culture is a whole other animal, if you don't pay attention you will lose track of the stuff in a flash. There are 54 total cards in this set and this pack features two of them, though be warned that the two you get may not be the ones shown on the package.

I don't care for anime/manga, all of these years of western weaboos asking me if I've seen "such and such anime" the second after I tell them I'm of Japanese ancestry have made me dislike it. But I will be the first to admit that the art-style can look incredible in stills like the one above. The scan didn't pick up on it but this card is somehow shiny with three different layers of sparkles despite being a thin acetate card. No I do not know how enSky accomplished this, but I am in awe all the same.

The backs on all of the cards we'll see in this post are like this in that they aren't really clear. But I have noticed that the closer you bring it to a light or lamp, the more clear and defined the picture gets.

Here is a "chibi" version of one of Miku's friends, "Meiko". Chibi is basically just a way of drawing a character in a cuter form with an even bigger/more exaggerated head and smaller body proportions. Also no noses. Ever. Noses aren't cute.

Pack 2

Next up is a pack of Uma Musume Clear Card Collection Gum. This is part of the Uma Musume Pretty Derby franchise which is a popular mobile app game. It's about cute anime girls who want to be the best horse girls in the world. Uma musume translates to horse daughter BTW (yes, I know that musume also translates to girl in some instances, go away weebs).

Much like the Hatsune Miku pack before, this is made by enSKY and denotes that there is a full 54 card set and that this pack only features two of them.

Here's a chibi version of a character I assume. Apparently this character is ready to have a workout from hell at the gym.

I assume that this "El Condor Pasa" is not the Peruvian folk song or the Simon & Garfunkel song inspired by the Peruvian folk song, and merely a character in this franchise.

Pack 3

The third and last pack we'll be looking at today is from Fate/Extra: Last Encore. Fate/Extra is a role-playing video game franchise and this Last Encore thing was an anime adaption made in 2018. I couldn't really tell you much about the game/show since I'm not familiar with it, I know there's fighting involved and I think there's a character who has conveniently lost their memories and must now fight in some unknown virtual universe while they try to piece back parts of their past. Sure, great that's not totally generic at all.

This is going to be different from the first two packs because it states that the set itself only has 18 cards and that this pack only has one card inside. Also unlike the first two packs that were completely concealed and hidden, this pack is in a clear cellophane pack.

Despite the ponytail I'm pretty sure this is a dude.

So anyway this was a look into the world of Japanese non-sports cards that can be found at supermarkets for like 108 yen (aprox $1 USD) each.

Also, I just want to end this post by showing how the gum is packaged. enSKY clearly did their homework and learned from where Topps and Fleer did shit when they packaged cards with gum. These are cleanly packaged in plastic wrapping (that's recyclable too!). No bug-proof powders necessary. No risk of the sugar in the gum staining the card.

My motherland, they do it right.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).

My First Three, Eh... Four!

The year is 2005, I'm eleven years old and I walk into a CVS Pharmacy with a parental guardian and notice something hanging on the same rack that housed the playing cards.

I don't have a picture of it but it was 2005 Topps Series 2.

While it wasn't the first pack of cards I had ever opened, it was the first pack of baseball cards I had ever bought/asked my parent to buy for me (the other "first packs" were B-Day presents and the like). It was just one and I wasn't really going in with any real idea of what I "want" inside the pack. Just that I wanted the pack and to open it to see what was inside.

Over half of the real contents of the inside will be lost to time but four cards have survived being my possession forever. One could argue that they also were what started my Yankees fandom.

The First Notable Card:

451 Jorge Posada

Yup, a Core Five member front and center. "Hey, it's someone I actually know!" I thought. At the time this card seemed super cool to me. I mean Posada's in action and this was during a hot streak where every single Topps flagship card made of Posada showed him in catching gear. You can see how an eleven year old doofus with no real affiliation with cards prior would find this cool.

One thing I didn't like though was that the numbers on the back (the card numbers) weren't jersey numbers. At the time I was a dumb kid who thought that the jersey number deserved to be acknowledged somewhere on the card. I scanned all over the card looking for any hint of Posada's number but never found it. I found out it was 20 in 2013.

In the past I've lamented how I didn't have a favorite player growing up. There's an alternate universe out there where Posada might have actually been that guy for me given how I had the dumb kid strategy of "he's the first player I got a baseball card of!". But then a few days later a friend of mine named Arthur told me that Posada was his favorite player and my dumb kid brain thought "wait, we're all supposed to like different players, I can't like the same player he likes!" so I scrapped considering Posada my favorite. I tried going with Hideki Matsui or Ichiro Suzuki for a while but because I didn't pull their cards in my first ever pack of cards they'd never be good enough. Eventually I just stopped trying to pretend I was into baseball and threw out any sense of fandom beyond a casual "I guess I like the Yankees" attitude until 2010.

Note, by 2019 Kenny would go on to consider some guy who was NINE when 2005 Topps Series 2 came out to be his all time favorite. And refer to himself in the third person for no real reason on occasion.

So while Posada might've been a good/bad starting point, what really cemented me casually calling the Yankees "my team" would be the rest of the pack.

The Second Card:

546 Mike Stanton

Yes, back to back Yankees. In the same pack. This was destiny I thought, two Yankees! Stanton wasn't nearly as good or famous as Posada so I wasn't going to declare him a favorite, and it was the right call because by the time I got in baseball there emerged another guy named Mike Stanton who'd eventually be referred to as Giancarlo Stanton.

But were two Yankees enough to convince someone as passive as me into making a major commitment?

The Third Card:

491 Tony Womack

Back-to-back-to-back Yankees. In the same pack. Alright, sure give me that navy blue Yankees cap it's a done deal now.
Even though Womack was like Stanton (in that I didn't know who the hell he was) 11 year old me was very impressed that I got three Yankees in a pack. This is tops (get it?), you have no choice, go Yankees.

At this point I was just wondering how long the streak would continue.

The Fourth Card:

450 Mike Piazza

A mixed emotion of joy and somberness overtook 11 year old Kenny. Here came Piazza making a late recruitment pitch to come root for the New York Mets. And Piazza was also someone I knew about because living in New York in the mid 2000's meant that it was all Piazza all the time (whenever it wasn't Jeter/A-Rod all the time). It might mean something!

Unfortunately by this point the damage was done, I like Piazza and all but the Yankees had already clinched my fandom. It's like the elections in France, whoever meets the threshold first wins. Here in 2019 I can say with 100% certainty that this was the correct move. I have nothing against the Mets but, damn do they need help.

The only other card I remember getting in the rest of the pack was 653, the Milwaukee Brewers team card. I don't have it anymore but it sticks out in my mind because I remember showing it to a friend of mine named Chris who was like "check it out, Kenny has the whole Brewers team" and then another friend J.R. was like "who cares, they suck".

I'd love to go in depth with the rest of the pack but as I said earlier, the rest of the pack disappeared into the sands of time. Apparently I did manage to get a Matt Holliday in there, something I'd forgotten about until I looked to see if anything survived. All I really remember was telling myself that I'd be a Seattle Mariners fan if I pulled an Ichiro Suzuki in the pack. I never did and in a way that was also a blessing in disguise because the Mariners are bad and should be ashamed of wasting the entirety of Ichiro's prime years in the states. Also I think I might've pulled two nondescript San Diego Padres out of that pack. Hmm...

I imagine that there's an alternative world where I didn't end up turning into a Yankees appreciator of sorts through this pack. Maybe I pulled a ton of Los Angeles Dodgers and ended up as a Dodger fan in New York state. Maybe I might've gotten super into the hobby/sports way earlier than during my peak pot smoking years in high school. There are a lot of "what ifs" at play here. However that doesn't change how the chips fell where they did and you all have me as I am now, a weirdo with virtually zero childhood memories of collecting or sports, offering you my takes from this perspective.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).

Loose Thoughts On Bowman Draft 2019

I'mma just be real with you all, this product gets less and less interesting to me every year.

Note: None of what I'm about to say is advice one way or the other on how to "invest". I'm NOT an expert or a consultant. Invest at your own risk.

1). 4 teams that matter, 26 teams that don't

Originally I had eight large paragraphs here about why this product isn't appealing because the big names expected to carry it are prospects that DON'T play for the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Dodgers or Chicago Cubs. Rendering it all useless.

In short, I don't see in the value in this offering because the best players in this product play on teams like the Reds or Padres or White Sox or the other 23 teams that aren't the big four. By default that means that they do not have any star power. They just don't. As an extension of that they shouldn't have that much selling power either. Or at least not as much as, say, Gleyber Torres or Rafael Devers did once upon a time.

The best you can do is have a small class of people come together and artificially inflate prices on a bunch of cards that should have stupidly large print runs like the Ronald Acuña Investment Trust Group, LLP have been able to do. But not every prospect is going to have some weird bullshit market like that (see: Nick Senzel who is a good prospect but his card value has always been dirt).

As prospects/players I do like guys like Kody Hoese (who is probably the best name in the entire product by default), all of the NYY prospects, Ryan Jensen, Cameron Cannon, Michael Busch, and Chase Strumpf, but there is no Aaron Judge or Walker Buehler or Andrew Benintendi or Kyle Schwarber here. Let me be clear also, I am not an investor and this is NOT any sort of investing advice. These are just merely names that I like on teams that I appreciate. They also just happen to be first/second rounders for the big market Dodgers, Yankees, Red Sox and Cubs but don't appear to be able to sell for more then $15 shipped (except Hoese but he's an outlier).

I'd love to be proven wrong and see them be cornerstones for the big four teams, but I've also seen what's happened to Jeren Kendall, every damn pitching prospect the Cubs try to develop, and honestly a lot of the prospects NYY tried developing after Judge graduated. Take that for data.

2). So what exactly is the point?

I don't want to be the guy who harps on value and money and investments so much, but I bring it up because this shit is too expensive to just treat as a hobby. This is well into "hope the IRS lets you deduct hobby expenses" territory (note: the IRS does not allow you to deduct hobby expenses following the tax rule changes that took effect in 2018). Who is buying this stuff? What exactly is the point of all of this?

That's a rhetorical answer, I know damn well that this is a product that has always catered to the online group break crowd for years.

Even so, is there really a ROI on this stuff? There must be for people to bother this much. But does it exceed everything after you factor in the time value of money? Does it exceed that by a significant enough amount to matter?

For that matter, who or what is supposed to be the intended market for these cards in in the future? Even in the future that market just has to be mostly investors looking to buy investments. Any casual collectors interested in autographs could just buy the cheaper alternatives like Bowman Sterling or any of Topps' non-rookie offerings because lord knows that Topps and Panini will continue to pump out autographs of these guys every damn year. Why pay $30+ when you can just pay like $8 for the same guy's signature? Is the BoChro brand really going to offer you anything different in terms of just being an autograph? For that matter, what happens when the player gets their Topps Chrome Rookie Autograph (which is apparently another big name autograph brand in the market now)? I get that the whole notion of rookies and pre-rookies is a serious point in this hobby, but if you're the average Joe, is wanting the "premier" card going to be that much of a priority when you can just as easily save money by going with a "lesser" brand?

These are genuine questions I have that I know I will never get honest answers to so long as people have something to lose.

3). Anthony Volpe will be in 2020 Bowman

Anthony Volpe, the Yankees' first round pick in the 2019 MLB Player Draft isn't even in 2019 Bowman Draft. Sure. Fine. Whatever. What's even the point of this again?

4). Hayden Wesneski

Credit where credit is due, Wesneski is the only player I actually needed a card of.

I like Jake Sanford, T.J. Sikkema, Jake Agnos and Josh Smith just fine but I've already seen them in Staten Island. To the uninformed their cards are the newest shiniest toys on the block. To me their cards are already yesterday's news. Wesneski was featured in the 2019 Pulaski Yankees team set but I never got his card, so I'm impressed that Bowman could be useful for once and at least give me their offering.

5). The Dreaded Repeaters

This isn't new, but I always feel the need to point out my disdain for repeaters in Bowman checklists. I get that Topps wants to go cheap by restricting the contracts it dishes out, as well as receive full value on the contracts they do give out. That doesn't mean I like what that leads to. I like Seigler, but he did not need his second Bowman base card of 2019 (third overall since 2018 Draft). If you're not going to use those repeater slots in any meaningful way because you need to "save" names for the following year's Bowman sets, just fucking shrink the checklist.

Once upon a time I looked forward to Bowman Draft. Here in 2019 I am no longer the type of collector jumping to see what kind of $10 BoChro auto of some second rounder in the poverty-ass Reds system I could pull out of a $220 box of Bowman Draft.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).

You Dare Mock The Son Of A Shepherd?!

When I got a Don Mattingly autograph at a card show on the last day of November, I got it knowing it was probably going to be my very last IP autograph of 2019. Well, not quite!

Modell's Sporting Goods has not only provided me an opportunity to get Austin Romine and Giovanny Urshela autographs this year, but it came through with another opportunity to meet an active stud, this time it was Sterling Shepard of the New York Giants.

Unlike the time I got Ottis Anderson's autograph, this time things went a smoother and I suffered no grief.

Because I already had a card in hand thanks to the 2019 Panini NFL Stickers I'd bought before. Fittingly enough all of those stickers/cards were purchased at Modell's so I think this is all Modell's way of giving back to me for spending so much there. At the day of I purchased another pack that somehow had Shepard inside (no it didn't, I got a third Patrick Mahomes). It's fine, it all came from Modell's anyway.

Of course Modell's also offered these cool bigger cards (I think they're 5x7 but I could be wrong) which was super dope.

As best as I can tell this signing event by Shepard was also part of a charity event type of thing where he paid for a bunch of athletic gear for a gaggle of kids, which I vibe with. There was a camera crew there and everything. Pretty interesting to see the type of PR vid I'd see browsing the Giants Twitter page being filmed before me.

Shepard was super nice and although he signed my card with a black pen (I had a blue sharpie ready but he already started signing the card before I could hand him the sharpie), it was pretty awesome meeting him. In typical Kenny fashion I gave him a gift as I try to do for most of the players I see IP and I gave him hand sanitizer because I didn't have enough time to buy Hi-Chews. He said he appreciated it though. I assume because of all of the handshakes he has to give out to strangers he's meeting smack dab in Times Square.

Woof, I entered this year with zero football IPs and now I've got two. One from a retired Giant and one from an active Giant. Life is funny like that sometimes, you might as well laugh along with it.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).

2019 IP Auto Count: 66

Some Update Fun, Zippy Style

The release of 2019 Update was one I'd been looking forward to since mid-July. Mainly because Thairo Estrada had posted on his Instagram that he was signing autographs for Topps. They were the 1984 throwback motif ones and I knew that this was Update bound. And if Thairo was gonna get certified rookie card autographs in Update, it likely meant that he was going to get rookie cards too.

And he did!
This festive little holiday themed card came to me courtesy of Once A Cub. Thairo is enjoying a massive influx of cards at the moment because he's getting the token New York Yankees rookie treatment from Topps. Luckily for me I kinda got off the Thairo collecting-boat back in 2016 because I really didn't want to deal with dipshits trying to inflate his prices just because his cards were exclusive in some capacity. Now I deal strictly with MiLB issues and not much else.

That said it is great to get a rookie card. Mainly because I can now just pair it up with the 1st Bowman Chrome and really see how far he's come since I first saw him in 2014 as a member of the Staten Island Yankees. Thairo's been through a lot since 2015 when I saw him almost daily, he survived an armed robbery/gunshot, he's survived Rule-5 roster crunches, he's continued to make the most of every opportunity he's been able to get at the big league/triple-A/double-A level. Thairo will continue to be cool to me because he just won't let anything stop him from being his usual kick-ass good at baseball self.

Also to pad out this post a little more, here's a Josh VanMeter rookie card that came to me courtesy of Night Owl Cards.

I don't really give a shit about the Cincinnati Reds but this card was one I wanted for a very specific reason.

You see, VanMeter was the prospect that the San Diego Padres traded to the Reds moments after the Reds had taken Luis Torrens in the 2016 Rule 5 Draft. Without him Torrens wouldn't have gone to San Diego and he likely would've been returned to the Yankees from the Reds.

If I had to guess, the Padres very likely knew that the Reds were picking second overall and had agreed to a trade of sorts in advance for a PTBNL so that was probably going to always be the plan. But still, it's somewhat unique to me in knowing that the guy who's been (to date) the only mortal traded in exchange for Torrens made it to the big leagues in 2019. Congrats to him.

Also if you were wondering where the heck this came from, it was yet another one of Gavin's customs. This was made and sent to me months ago (alongside the Star vs the Forces of Evil cards) but I could never really find the right timing to blog about it until now. It features both the men involved in the trade and now here in 2019 I can proudly say that both have rookie cards attached to their names.

And those were a few notes on 2019 Topps Update. Even in a product loaded with no-names that probably don't mean much to most of you, it's managed to produce some really special names for me and me alone.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).

Card Show Pickups: Hell of a Haul

So this past weekend a card show was hosted at a place not too far from me. Normally I wouldn't bother since it'd be the post-Thanksgiving, dinky basement show but one of the guest autograph signers was so special that even I had to attend.

Might as well cut to the chase and start from there since you could argue that's basically where the meat for this post is coming from.

Right off the bat one of the signers was John Candelaria. The Candy Man was a free signer at this show and it was pretty great getting his autograph on a card depicting him as a New York Yankee all these years after getting an inscribed 8x10 for Bob Walk The Plank (RIP).

Candelaria was also the first player I had asked to sign with black ink since, I dunno, 2014? Reason being that I've been around the blog enough to know that the blue navy sweatshirt he's got on in the picture might not go well with the blue sharpie ink, so I asked for black to help it stand out. And I think that it worked out.

John Candelaria

As cool as Candelaria was though, the real fun came courtesy of the big name that started signing an hour after Candelaria's time slot was done.

Yup, Donnie Baseball. Don The Hit Man Mattingly.
It was because of opportunities like this that I held out on buying a certified autograph, even back when I was super into getting certified autographs of notable Yankees in 2013. Ultimately this IP auto ticket cost more than the cheapest certified Mattingly on eBay, but considering how I'm meeting the man in person and everything, it's super worth it.

You'll also notice that I went with a Drake's cakes card. One might wonder "why didn't you go with something more traditional like a 1984 rookie card or a classic 1987 card? Or even your 2017 Topps SP variation?".

I did think long and hard about going with a Topps flagship card like 1987 Topps but it kinda struck me that there are a lot of signed Mattingly flagship cards out in the world, especially that one. I wanted something a little more special and less basic. Obviously the 2017 SP fits the bill but that card's charm comes from the photograph (of Mattingly signing autographs fittingly enough), and having a big signature over it seemed really counter intuitive.

My closing argument is, how many 1985 Drake's cards do you see signed by Mattingly (or really anyone in the 44 card subset) out there? I'd assume that there aren't many.

Honestly the only card that came close to serious consideration was a 1988 Topps UK mini because of the UK mini factor, but I couldn't justify spending what I did on the ticket to get a mini signed. So I went with Drake's. Except for the 2017 SP, every other Mattingly card I had left was gifted to him on the spot. I assumed that he always see's them and gets them, but he assured me that he'll make good use of them. Thanks Don.

Don Mattingly

So yeah, two kick-ass IP autographs in one day. And both were relatively reasonable prices at that. I was very happy and honestly felt good about the stuff I was taking home with me.

Other pickups of note included this Kaapo Kakko rookie. Panini has an exclusive autograph license with Kakko so Upper Deck won't be releasing any Kakko autographs anytime soon. As of now Kakko's Young Guns (the regular ones) have yet to hit the market as he'll likely be in 2019-20 Upper Deck Series 2, as of now he only has the Score rookie cards and Young Guns Canvas rookies.

This Josh Stowers is interesting as it is shoddy. It was one of the cards that was made by Blowout Cards (yes, the online card retailer) and were part of one of the bigger box breakers' promo of some sort. For now this fills the void for the Stowers autograph slot I needed to fill in my Top NYY Prospects throughout the years thing.

This Mason Williams was once worth north of $10, now it's fallen to $3. Oof. It took a long while but the 2011 Bowman Chrome Prospects Yankees autos are slowly falling into my grasp.

See? Ben Gamel here further helps. Gamel was also a welcome "upgrade" for the top prospects project because until I got this BoChro the only other auto I had was a TTM of his on a card depicting him as a Mariner. Normally I'd be just fine with that, but this Gamel BoChro was on my mind for a while (can you believe that these were only available on eBay as BINs for $30 each even though the rare auctions went for barely $6.50?). The Stowers-Williams-Gamel was part of a bundle trade so I didn't spend any cash on it. Works for me.

All in all it was a really enjoyable show for me. This was one of the few card show hauls (as little as it might seem) where I went home feeling fulfilled and happy. A complete 180 from the show that took place around Thanksgiving in 2017. Two really awesome IP autos, an NBA superstar I really wanted and some key cards acquired via trade. As light as this might seem to all of you who have different tastes than me, I was on Cloud 9.

Then I ran into credit card issues involving charges I need to dispute (and a fraud charge too), which just fucking ruined my whole Saturday night. I hate life.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

2019 IP Auto Count: 64

A Brilliant Trade

We're all aware that shipping costs have increased this year. Unfortunately that's doubly true for international shipping. I've kept international trades to a minimum this year mainly because I can't really afford to dish out $30+ for a package that would've only cost me $20 max to ship out a year ago. Also I've had the benefit of going to Japan twice this year, meaning that I could just use Japan's Postal Service to send stuff for far cheaper.

But I did undergo a trade earlier in the year and a not too long ago I "completed" my second.

I use the word "completed" in quotes because this collector (@you_oh_ on Twitter) is the only one I trade with like I do with the rest of you. Which is to say that I send them stuff at random when I just want to ship things out for the heck of it. Padded packages have gotten expensive but PWE's are still manageable (even to Japan) so I have done a stupid but cost effective thing of sending cards in PWE's across the Pacific to them a few times. They're surprised and liked the cards enough every time (I think, hopefully they didn't get damaged). That they saw fit to zap me back.

@you_oh_ saw fit to send me some serial numbered Yankees and while that's fun and all, what really stole the show were the Dragons. Keep in mind that this is the same trading partner who once set me the entire 2017 BBM Dragons team set (among others). But even more than that was the awesome Luis Torrens sketch card seen above. This marks the second such sketch of Torrens to enter my collection (after The Lost Collector's bubble mailer sketch obviously) and is probably the seventh custom Torrens card overall to enter my collection. Which is kind of insane, it just really goes to show how generous and creative card collectors who really care about their trading partners can get.

As for the official cards, the Ultra XTAL Ogasawara card above certainly kicked things off in a big way.

It's limited to 50 copies and is very worthy of being from a set called Glory. It's truly glorious.

Ooh, here's my first ever jersey/memorabilia card of a Dragon. AND OF SHINNOSUKA OGASAWARA AT THAT!

This is an undershirt so no super mojo jersey patch here but still, it's fucking dope.

This one had 300 total copies made but you know what, this one's mine now and that's all that matters.

And finally there was super cool 3D card of Mr. Three Base, Masahiko Morino.

This one is numbered to 100 copies and is probably my first ever 3D card issued by a Japanese company.

As if that wasn't fun on it's own, @you_oh_ once again sent me a complete set.

A boxed set of 2019 BBM Chunichi Dragons Brilliant.

Brilliant was one of BBM's team oriented sets that was considered to be high end (and priced as such) because they wanted to capitalize on the hype around Akira Neo and really get people to pay for the potential of pulling his autograph.

This box sent my way was used/just the set so I don't know what the autograph that accompanied these cards was, but I can tell you that this was set 0543 out of 1050 total sets. Which in turn means that even though these cards don't have serial numbers on them, they're all technically limited to 1050 copies.

While I like the snazzy-ness of these Japanese boxes, there is always something to be said about how the way BBM packages these cards is a nightmare for the corners. I'm not a stickler about condition since I'm not a grader or anything, but I do have concerns when packaging is designed specifically for stuff to fail.

Eh screw it. It might not be autographed but I did get another Neo rookie (technically numbered out of 1050 copies) out of it either way. I consider that a win for me.

All in all this was a super simple but still super fun trade. This wasn't particularly pre-planned on either my or @you_oh_'s part, and honestly I'm just fine with that. This is a lot easier than going back and forth squabbling over value. Though I do really feel like I owe them a lot now. Luckily for me I've still got the remnants of my once proud Hiroki Kuroda PC to give me some massive ammo (@you_oh_ is a Hiroshima Carp fan BTW) *grins nefariously*.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).